The Fallow Brow

<MA>15+ Strong Language

I’ve just stumbled across the most half-arsed, moronic assessment of why Internet censorshitp is good that I have seen in my life.  Someone let Clive Hamilton out of his sheltered workshop for the criminally insane to post this garbage

Let me start by saying I am not a fan of violent or extreme porn, as that will be the first accusation the wowsers fling at me. If all the sites that push this crap went bust tomorrow, I’d be throwing a little party. Nor am I a “libertarian” as described by Mr. Hamilton in his article.  I am highly technical, and understand in almost excruciating detail how the Internet works, it’s underlying protocols and design philosophy (it’s a series of tubes, right?). Fixing Internet problems has been my full time job for most of the last decade, during which time I have seen every failure of the network imaginable, and several unimaginable ones.  I have experience working with filtering software, “deep packet inspection” boxes, proxies, and all sorts of assorted and sundry related technologies.  I am also married and the father of two children, which I think is probably relevant in this debate.

I haven’t got time to debug every fault and fallacy contained in Clives’ infantile whine, but here’s a few quick thoughts.

“teenagers view and are probably being damaged by extreme and violent pornography on the internet”. Probably? Anyone with any formal scientific training will tell you to read this as “there is no proof that teenagers view or are damaged by extreme and violent porn on the Internet, but it sure helps to forward our agenda if we hint that there is”.

“Along with sites specialising in depictions of rape, bestiality and extreme fetishes, these sorts of images are easily and freely accessible on the internet.” The word “easily” is misleading in this context. Sure, it’s out this sort of stuff does not just come knocking at your door.  You either have to search for it, or have it pushed on you by a “friend”. “Freely” may also be inaccurate, as a lot of sites want a credit card for access.  Extreme porn is also, from my limited experience, the minority of porn available.  This is not an exhaustive test, but a quick Google Images search for the word “boob” turned up about half a million pictures, while bestiality was less than forty thousand, and none of the ones I saw contained any actual bestiality.  (note to self: bookmark that boob one before the government blocks it).

“Ethical considerations prevent systematic research into the effects of viewing such material on boys in their early teens, but the evidence we have indicates that many boys view it, some frequently, and some develop unrealistic beliefs about sexual relationships and perverse attitudes towards girls, such as being disgusted by pubic hair.” How convenient.  I Have two problems with this, the first technical: If the practice of viewing extreme porn is as widespread as you believe (“many boys view it”), it should be easy to find a bigger sample to study.  What evidence do you have? What is the source? What was the sample size? How were the sample group selected (ASL etc.)? Methodology?  When was the research done, and what follow-up has been done since?  Bah. My second problem is the “some develop unrealistic beliefs about sexual relationships” part. Growing up as a nerd, I will admit my expectations of sexual relationships were completely weird.  I had no clue.  The film Porky’s came out and was probably closer to the truth about human sexuality than my beliefs at the time. Let’s be honest, perverse attitudes toward girls tend to come from having both X and Y chromosomes, and/or pubescent hormones.

“We know that parents are extremely concerned and feel overwhelmed by the pressure on them to regulate their children’s access to this type of material.” Poor babies.  If the Internet confuses or scares you then you can a) get a clue;  I’m pretty sure someone has written a book on the Internet by now.  Or take a class.  Or ask your kids, it could be a bonding session, or b) fuck off;  Dismantle you computer, and save yourself your monthly ISP bill. You are a loose cannon anyway, and probably infected with virii, trojans , and bots. The less of you there are on the Internet the happier I am.  This touches on this weird idea that the Internet is for everyone.  It’s clearly not, and if you can’t take the time to learn what you are doing then stay the hell away. I would also advise you not to drive a car or buy semi-automatic weapons without first gaining some rudimentary training on their operation. You are just going to have to understand that not everything in the world is meant for kids.  If you don’t believe that then feel free to experiment with giving your toddlers adult-sized doses of sleeping tablets, or letting them drive your idiotic monster 4WD.

“They [parents] don’t want to be the household spy and policeman”. How about the spineless arseholes just start acting like, let’s say, PARENTS. These sound like they are either hippy-dippy acid casualties who think rules stunt a child’s creativity, or they are the kind of latch-key never-at-home parents.  My four year old has already had to contend with the demon-spawn of both these types of fucktards at her pre-school.  If you really want to stop kids from being damaged, get those poor little fuckers with clueless parents some help.  Don’t go blaming extreme porn when the kids are clearly seeking out extreme porn because they are already fucked up.

“An astonishing 93 per cent of parents were in favour [of porn blocking]”. Duh. It doesn’t say that 93% of people are in favour of blocking for every Australian regardless of whether they want it or not.  This brings me to the first really big fallacy. People see that the porn filtering is opt-out and think it’s OK.  The problem is porn is not the only thing the Government are filtering, and there is no opt-out for “illegal” content, more on this later.

“These sorts of comments reflect the contempt for children that has emerged in some segments of society.” Rubbish.  I certainly don’t have contempt for children. Well, maybe your children if they are anything like you, but not in general.  I get on well with children, we have fun, they like me and I mostly like them.  What I don’t do is confuse children with adults.  I think one of the reasons they like me is that I don’t talk down to them, but by the same token, I know they are not adults, and don’t treat them as such.  I may jokingly offer a ten year old a beer, but I won’t actually give it to them.  This comes back to knowing that not everything is for children, and if dopes like Hamilton can’t get that very simple concept then someone needs to punt them to the nearest loony bin.

“Besides, we live in a democracy. If parents club together and decide that it is too difficult or untenable for them to protect children by themselves and want their governments to help them then that is a perfectly legitimate view.” If the majority of Australians singed a petition for you to stick your head in a bucket of water three times and pull it out twice, would you do it Clive?  I’m pretty sure I can arrange it.  This stinks of that whole “wisdom of crowds” lunacy.  If the majority want it, it must be right and good.  Anyone who has ever watched any reality TV can tell you how well that works out.  See here for an example.

“This argument for mandatory internet filters is in principle the same as the argument for the film censorship system.” Bullshit.  Did I mention I was accredited by the Office of Film and Literature Classification to rate computer games once?  I have been there.  I have a pretty good understanding of how the system works, it’s strengths and weaknesses, checks and balances.  Film censorship in Australia acts mostly as a guide to help inform peoples choices about movies.  Films that are “refused classification” are often pretty repugnant (“raped by an angel” anyone?). There are a number of fundamental differences between the world of cinema/books and the Internet, the most obvious of which is that just about every man woman and child on the planet can put up whatever they want without the interference of editors or publishers, and without the need for a distribution channel.  This blog entry is unlikely to find its way into Dymocks stores, for example. This is another reason to keep the clueless away from the ‘net.  Trying to filter has become an impossible task.  Not nearly impossible, just impossible.

“too many internet libertarians and industry spokespeople cover up their refusal to countenance any sort of regulation by insisting that it won’t work.” Dude, it won’t work.  Truly. I know Academia loves to masturbate over issues like this, but I have work to do.  Since it is impossible, you may as well have a community debate about making it mandatory for men to grow a third testicle.  If that’s your idea of fun, knock yourself out but don’t be surprised if I don’t turn up to your onanistic debating club.

“The Government is currently commissioning trials to see how effective filters can be.” Let me save you the time and money. For those of you who are dumb-asses that should stay off the net, let me try to explain how filtering works.  There are a few main approaches to filtering web sites:

1. Blacklisting.  Compile a big list of “bad” sites.  Any new ones that get reported (it won’t be long before Christian groups have this blacklisted) are added to the list.  There is a problem in that one moron on MySpace could get the whole site blacklisted if the list maintainer is not careful (i.e. is a public servant). This is still probably the most effective and least obtrusive form of blocking, but it requires a trained human being to evaluate every single site reported as bad.
2. Whitelisting.  The worst solution – block every web-site in the world unless it has been checked and approved by your caring government first.
3. Content inspection.  This is what the government will be using, I can more-or-less guarantee.  Software looks at web pages and tries to spot illegal or pornographic sites by parsing the text, and analysing the pictures.  Parsing text is fraught with problems, and leads to things like this. How, from a programmatic standpoint, can you determine the difference between a “pro-anorexia” web-site, and someone who is trying to stop them?  The text contains all the same buzz-words, and are more similar in style than they would like to admit. Analysing pictures is a slow process requiring a lot of computational power, and vastly more prone to error than text parsing.  There have been a number of schemes developed, for example calculating the percentage of the photo containing skin tones, but this stuff mostly fails miserably in real world applications. Skin-tones vary from white (Japanese Geisha) through pinks, tans, browns and near blacks, and with the number of camera angles and zooms available determining the shapes of naughty parts is unbelievably tricky.  My sister-in-law wrapped all her Christmas presents this year in dark brown and pink.  Sorry, but you won’t be able to see my holiday photos next year as some retarded piece of code determined it was a Negro woman masturbating in a forest.  This software will generally have about 10% false positives, that is one in ten pages you visit will be wrongly blocked.  Given the February 2007 estimate of 29.7 billion extant web pages, that would mean almost 3 billion pages you should be able to see but can’t.  More worryingly about 5% of sites which should be blocked will sail through the filters unhindered, and believe me once the porn-mongers find out which ones don’t get blocked, they will emulate them in very short order. The number of unblocked porn sites will sky-rocket.  The number of incorrectly blocked good sites will never be significantly reduced; even if they get whitelisted, new incorrectly blocked pages will proliferate.

Bottom line is filtering will a) slow down the Internet (and I mean a LOT), b) block literally billions of perfectly OK web pages, and c) not stop porn. What part of this is a good thing? Tell me again why you want a debate now?

Any vendor that could come up with a fast, accurate system of blocking bad stuff on the Internet could name his price.  I’m serious.  A lot of vendors will claim they can do that, but even for small installations (a house or small business) the results are pretty poor.  Scaled up to a larger corporation the results could be better or worse, depending on the budget, “cluefulness”, and diligence of the IT staff.  When you scale that up to an entire nation, you’re going to be watching how slow your emails are downloading, even with your new 12Mbps connection, and wishing for the good old internet days, when a Christmas tree was just a Christmas tree.

“Clive Hamilton is Churls Spurt Professor of Public Toilets at the Centre for Applied Philately and Pubic Ethnics, ANUS” Fair enough then.  That explains quite a bit.  I could go on but I’m out of time and patience.  If I keep going now it will just start to turn nasty.

BTW: I’m mad as hell at this stupidity, and I am going to try like buggery to get to the December 13 protest in Sydney.  I advise you do the same, because once the filters come in I will be the one reading YOUR email.